Red Seat Case Study

Client: Weatherly Consulting

Position: Ongoing screening of project managers and business analysts

The challenge:

Weatherly is a firm that provides consulting services to some of the biggest names in the financial industry. We worked with them from 2003 to 2005, during a period of rapid and dramatic growth for the company. Our job was to maintain a hiring plan for Weatherly's Minneapolis and San Francisco offices, screening for numerous positions, many of them requiring very specific qualifications—most of the positions required candidates to hold PMI (Project Management Institute) credentials, and many required project management experience in a specific type of financial services company, like a bank, a brokerage firm, or a life insurance company. Although Weatherly needed to hire a large number of project managers, business analysts, and other consultants, they maintained extremely high standards. The most difficult part of our job was making sure candidates fit Weatherly's exhaustive criteria so that Weatherly's internal staff would be making good use of their time when conducting in-person interviews.

Our approach:

Over the two years that we worked with Weatherly, we received more than 2,000 resumes and conducted hundreds of preliminary phone interviews. For every candidate who made it to the finalist stage, we conducted an average of 6 reference checks. This was a highly collaborative effort in which good communication with both the client and the candidates was paramount. Because Weatherly's hiring team was so strapped for time, there was little margin for error: we had to respond quickly and ensure that the candidates we sent for review were of the highest caliber and had all of the necessary qualifications. In addition to getting the staff they needed to grow their business, Weatherly also saved a lot of money by working with Red Seat—we documented all of our activity and billed the client on a monthly basis, which cost them only a fraction of what they'd have been paying a full-time, internal recruiter.

How we found the winner:

There were lots of winners, but perhaps the biggest one was Weatherly. They grew to the point that it became more economical for them to bring their recruiting in-house, and so our final project with them was hiring their human resources director. To make the transition as easy as possible for them, we transferred our entire database of Weathlerly applicants to their new recruiting system.